The Departments of Justice and Treasury announced parallel actions Wednesday that target what the Biden administration says are Russian government-sponsored attempts to manipulate U.S. public opinion ahead of the November election.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who said the State Department would also take separate actions, announced that the DOJ had on Wednesday unsealed an indictment in the Southern District of New York that charges two employees of the Russian-backed media network RT with conspiring to commit money laundering and to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
"That law enacted nearly a century ago, was enacted to ensure that the American people were informed when a foreign power engages in political activities or seeks to influence public discourse," Garland said during an unrelated elections event. "The American people are entitled to know when a foreign power is attempting to exploit our country's free exchange of ideas in order to send around its own propaganda."
Garland accused the defendants of implementing a nearly $10 million scheme to fund and direct a Tennessee-based company to publish and disseminate content that was considered favorable to the Russian government. The company then contracted with U.S.-based social media influencers to share that content on their platforms. The information was "often consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine," the attorney general said.
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"The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers as ties to RT and the Russian government. Instead, the defendants and the company claimed that the company was sponsored by a private investor, but that private investor was a fictitious persona," Garland said.
The attorney general said that the investigation remains ongoing and the DOJ is seizing 32 internet domains that the Russian government and Russian actors have used to influence the U.S. election.
Before Garland's annoucements, the Treasury Department announced that its Office of Foreign Assets Control had designated 10 people and two entities as part of a "coordinated U.S. government response to Moscow’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election."
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The Treasury Department said that in early 2024, beyond using tools like AI deep fakes and disinformation, executives at RT "began an even more nefarious effort to covertly recruit unwitting American influencers in support of their malign influence campaign."
"RT used a front company to disguise its own involvement or the involvement of the Russian government in content meant to influence U.S. audiences," the Treasury Department said.
Under the new actions, all property and interests in property of the designated people that are in the U.S. or in the possession or control of Americans are blocked and must be reported to the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Department said.
U.S. intelligence agencies have previously assessed that Russia wants to interfere in the 2024 election and flagged RT as a source of Russian propaganda and disinformation and required it to register as a foreign agent.
RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan “has close ties to top Russian Government officials” and has stated publicly that “the Russian Government sets rating and viewership requirements for RT and, 'since RT receives budget from the state, it must complete tasks given by the state,'" according to an ODNI report released publicly in 2017 following Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence specifically said in July that Russia is seeking to exert influence over the U.S. election to undermine support for the Democratic presidential nominee and American public support for arming Ukraine.
CNN was first to report the expected sanctions.
Russia was found to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election by multiple U.S. investigations, including by the team led by then-special counsel Robert Mueller. The probes determined that the efforts were intended to help Donald Trump win the election over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
In February, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the Biden administration had "concerns" about possible Russian interference in the 2024 election cycle.
“This is not about politics,” Sullivan said. “This is about national security. It is about a foreign country, a foreign adversary, seeking to manipulate the politics and democracy of the United States of America.”
NBC News reported that same month that U.S. officials and cyber experts said that Russia was already disseminating disinformation using bots and fake online accounts to hurt President Joe Biden, while he was running for re-election, and other Democratic candidates.
Russian outlets also helped spread misinformation about the 2020 election, but their impact was dwarfed by former President Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election himself.
Trump sought to undermine the 2020 election with false claims of mass voter fraud, an effort which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Nothing that Russia or Iran or China could say is anywhere near as wild as what the president is saying,” Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who tracks foreign disinformation, told NBC News in 2020. “We cannot say this time that Russia, Iran or China interfered in a significant way. They don’t need to write fake news this time — we’re making plenty of fake news of our own.”
It was clear shortly after the 2020 election that Trump’s claims were false and that he had lost to President Joe Biden, but Trump — now the 2024 Republican nominee — has still not conceded his loss, even though many Jan. 6 defendants have told courts they regret that they were gullible enough to fall for Trump’s false claims.
Trump is facing four federal felony charges that specifically relate to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, with a federal grand jury returning an indictment that alleges that Trump knowingly lied about the 2020 election by spreading claims that “were unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing.” Trump has indicated he his lawyers will enter a not guilty plea on his behalf during a hearing on the case on Thursday.
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